The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of electronic communication devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing electronic devices to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to cloud systems which store and share data for consumers of the cloud system.
At present, a cloud system may utilize JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for storing instance data, and JSON Schema to specify data models that validate the instance data. Since JSON and JSON Schema typically do not expose a common object model, in order to enable indexing, the cloud system may rely on mappings in the data model to perform search operations. In this regard, all data in the payload may not be indexed, but rather only certain properties and attributes that are mapped to fields in the index definition. Stated differently, the more attributes to include in the index, the more fields that are needed in the index definition. For most current indexing solutions, this may not be scalable as memory capacity may become an issue.
Additionally, at present it is possible to validate instances of application data using JSON Schema, however it is difficult to validate JSON schemas themselves, as JSON Schema is typically not expressive enough to validate the data models automatically. This is because the functionality of data modeling languages needs to be expanded in order to meet the requirements of cloud-based systems.
For example, a cloud system data model not only contains the listing of properties and their constraints, but also contains object-metadata, property annotations, index definitions, and access control policies. At present, a different modeling language such as Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language (RDF/OWL) may be expressive enough, however RDF/OWL may lack latency requirements for processing the instance data, and may cause difficulties in utilizing JSON as the serialization format.
In view of the foregoing drawbacks, there is a need for a data protocol that processes data of cloud systems in an efficient manner.